A former picky eater discovering healthy living through eating clean and running.

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This past weekend Tuna and I took a little trip down to Durham, NC to visit my mom!

On Saturday morning, my mom had a healthy breakfast bar for us to wake up to. My concoction was full of strawberry yogurt, granola, chia seeds, flaxseed, pumpkin seeds, almond slivers, and blueberries. Yum!

Oh yeah, and mimosas. 🙂

We all went on a morning walk in the Duke Forest. The pine trees are sooooo tall.

After lunch, we toured around the Durham Bulls stadium as it was gettin’ all fixed up for spring. They’re currently adding a new scoreboard to the field.

The sports day continued with a look inside the famous Cameron Indoor Stadium at Duke. Even though our UVA pride was kicking in, it was cool to observe where a lot of bball history has happened.

Apparently there is a tradition called K-ville where students camp out in tents all winter in an attempt to score Duke/UNC rivalry game tickets. That’s just cray, IMO.

The Duke campus is gorgeous and it turned out to be a great day to walk around outside. I wish D.C. would take the hint.

The Duke Chapel –

I spy a wedding….

If you can’t tell, I had fun pretending I was a photographer on our mini vacation. We certainly had to walk off all of the delish food we ate while we were there. And it was definitely nice to get out of town/have a change of scenery! Perhaps we can all take a page from the South’s slower paced lifestyle. I liked having the reminder to stop and take a look around.

It was decent tasting for a wrap, though it still isn’t that healthy with it’s mayonnaise based dressing and white tortilla. But after my double cheeseburger incident above, I don’t think my body was complaining to see a little bit of lettuce.

I still think cheat weekends at events with yummy junk food are worth it. I may not feel so hot afterwards, but I spent my time enjoying yummy food rather than resenting it!

The Durham Farmers’ Market features all-local produce and goods from farms within 70 miles of the Durham city limits. Click hereto see a few reasons why buying local is the way to go.

This weekend was the week before the main spring/summer season, so I figured there wouldn’t be too many vendors with fresh goods to sell.

Boy, was I wrong.

Even though it was a preview of the bigger farmers’ market in the weeks to come, there were tons of people there! My mom kept saying that it looked like a festival. It seems as though Durham’s foodies are an enthusiastic bunch.

67 vendors were busy selling items that they produced themselves.

There were so many vegetables for sale that I didn’t know what half of them were! See mystery vegetable number 1:

Each week, a local chef cooks in the center of the market, showing how to create dishes with ingredients that are in season.

Not only is the produce at local farmers’ markets really good for you, it’s cheaper than grocery stores! (A common misconception).

Before this weekend, if you asked me what a pecan looked like still in it’s shell, I couldn’t tell you.

Pecans were everywhere in Durham. I think it’s a southern thing.

That’s not all. There was a whole second section of the farmers’ market: the food truck section.

I had to stop for some shaved ice from Sweet Water.

I sampled the pistachio flavor – look how green!

But I ended up choosing watermelon. Delish.

My mom’s bf went straight for the pretzel truck. The gouda pretzel was just about the best thing ever.

I’m really glad I got to experience the Durham Farmers’ Market because it reminded me of how good the food and produce is at farmers’ markets. It was the perfect inspiration to scope out the different ones around D.C. this spring and summer!

When we got home, I reluctantly weighed myself with one eye closed. I was thinking it would be about +7or 8 lbs. I peeked at the scale, and frowned in disbelief! I only gained half a pound throughout our entire trip. We did walk a lot and – we did sweat a lot.

Lesson learned: you aren’t going to blow up and die if you indulge and eat everything in sight once in a while.

It was also nice to be reminded of certain foods I haven’t utilized in awhile by the restaurants we went to and the meals served by our hosts.

Tuna’s sister whipped up a fruit smoothie for us that I’ve already made a bunch of times since I’ve been home.

Tropical Smoothie

Ingredients:

1/2 cup strawberries

1/3 cup blueberries

1 banana

1/3 cup vanilla yogurt

1 cup apple juice

4 ice cubes

Another lesson learned: trying new foods doesn’t have to be scary. If you try something and don’t like it, you don’t have to eat it.

I tried a shit ton of new foods on the trip. And I actually liked…..some of them.

We woke up Saturday with a cloud of doom over our heads because it was our last day in Brazil!

Our flight left Saturday night, so we had to cram in lots of fun stuff for the day.

Tuna’s parents took us to a local favorite for lunch called Academia de Cachaça. Let’s back up a hot sec and explain the importance of cachaça.

Cachaça (basically Brazilian rum) is the type of liquor in a caipirinha, the national cocktail of Brazil. As someone who only likes alcoholic drinks that you can’t taste the alcohol in, I wholeheartedly endorse caipirinhas.

Just add ice, sugar, and limes to cachaça and you’ll be good to go. Meaning – one caipirinha will have you tripping down the curb back from Plataforma.

Now you understand that the Academia de Cachaça would naturally have the best caipirinhas in Rio. Which was good because I needed a slight buzz in order to muster enough courage to try, “the one dish you have to try while you’re Brazil.”

When Tuna found out we were having feijoada, the national meal, he immediately turned to me in terror.

Feijoada is a stew of beans made of pork and beef.

His parents asked me, “do you like soup (stew)?” No.

Ok….“do you like beans?”

No.

Hmm…well…“do you like pork?”

Noo.

I do like bacon though. I prayed pork translated to a few bacon bits sprinkled on top of the feijoada.

Alas, that was not the case.

Yes, I ate that.

Luckily, you get to mix feijoada with cooked greens, orange slices, and farofa. I knew I liked farofa from the night before at the churrascaria. Farofa is manioc (yucca) flour cooked in butter and olive oil. It kind of tastes like nothing. Perfect.

Oh, and white rice. The item that my Chinese order for ten years of my life solely consisted of.

Tuna’s dad took pity on me and scooped me out a conservative portion of feijoada with just the beef tenderloin.

Guess what?

I ate it all.

I cleaned my plate. And it was even pretty good! It wasn’t my favorite meal I’ve ever eaten, but I did like it and I’d eat it again.

Even I was impressed with me.

After we rolled ourselves home from lunch, it was time to pack up and cry head out to our last vacation activity.

We had the national cocktail, the national dish, and now it was time for “the national passion,” according to our driver, Tomás.

A football game!

Er… as we Americans call it – soccer.

The game was the best rivalry in Rio: Flamengo vs. Vasco.

Flamengo has the largest fan base in Rio and their club is in Tuna’s parents’ neighborhood, so they had our allegiance!

The only time I was scared during our stay in Brazil was on our way into the stadium. The fans get really crazy and police with giant shotguns were running towards crowds of people. There was a lot of shouting and shoving going on.

But as soon as we got to our seats, the friendly rivalry resumed with the sound of Brazilian drumming in the Flamengo section.

Though we had to leave after the first half to catch our plane, it was a pretty great way to end our amazing Brazilian adventure.

Can we just look at the view from our window in Brazil again? It makes me happy. Slash it will be the background of my phone/computer forever.

Friday – the day after Thanksgiving – was our last full day in Brazil. We started our packed day of sightseeing early with a boat tour of Rio on Guanabara Bay. Isn’t the boat cool looking?

We got there just in time to hop on the boat and elbow people out of the way to get good seats on the uncovered front part on the left. We had tons of cray tourists from different countries sitting near us. The Italians were especially booze-tastic, and sang lots of songs in Italian for us. Loudly.

The first part of the tour approached Sugarloaf. Can you see the cable car lines?

Here’s a sick view of the city and landmarks! Sugarloaf is on the left and Corcovado is the pointy mountain to the right of the middle of the picture. Hmmm..maybe I should change this picture to my phone/computer background forever…

Here you can see a little more of the city. FYI – Rio is massive, if you haven’t figured that out already! The current population is about 6.3 million people. Just to give you an idea – that’s twice as many people as L.A.

Hey, fisherman!

For some reason, I was obsessed with this quaint little church on the side of a mountain.

Let’s be honest, it’s probably because it looked exactly like the church on the mountain at the end of Mamma Mia.